Imagine you’ve got a box. Let’s say a black box, just for visual effect. Black equals cool, right?
Size doesn’t matter, but it’s smallish, sort of flat, and, well . . . boxy. Now, inside the box, place five atoms. Those atoms can’t be seen with the naked eye, because they’re, like, really, really small. But you know that and you know they are in there.
So, black box, four, maybe five atoms. We’re good so far? The trick is going to be finding those atoms without actually seeing them.
What’s it made of? You mean the box? Um. Plastic. It doesn’t really matter. It’s black and plastic. Black plastic. And before you ask, it doesn’t matter what kind of atoms. It just doesn’t. Trust me.
Here comes the really cool part. We find the atoms by shooting lasers into the box. Well, we could say narrow beams of light, not lasers. But lasers are so much cooler. If the laser rips through to the other side of the box, like, um . . . something does when nothing stops it, then you might suspect that an atom is not where you shot the light, right? Maybe.
Now, imagine that the light smacks into one of those atoms . . . Well, yes. I know atoms are very small, but that doesn’t make them impossible to hit. My point is that laser light hits them and — pow! — it’s sucked right into the atom, or detours off to the side of the box, or reflects back to its starting point. But now you know where to find that atom. Maybe, or maybe not!
I agree that from the atom’s point of viewu even a tiny box is infinitely large. Would it help if I drew a diagram for you? Better yet, let me make a model of it. After all this is SCIENCE — did I say that loud enough? — not some kind of game. Ah, silly me. You’re right it is a game. A fairly abstract and puzzling one, at that.
And it takes more than a bit of imagining to get the better of a game like that.
The work of electrical engineer Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his invention of the CAT scanner, inspired Eric Solomon to invent Black Box. Waddingtons first published it in 1976 and then Parker Brothers released their version in 1977. Parker Brothers actually set up a demonstration booth for the game at the 1978 Origins hobby game conven- tion in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If you played the game with their demonstrator, you got a copy — which I did.
Called “the ultimate game of hide and seek” on the Parker Brothers edition packaging, Black Box features gameplay that revolves around finding four or five “atoms” (represented by marbles) hidden on a square playing board. The board is laid out as an eight by eight grid, and the four edges each have an adjacent row of positions where tokens can be placed to mark the entry and exit points for the imaginary beams of light. One player hides the atoms. The other tries to find them. If you’re interested in playing solo, the game rules include a number of premade puzzles. This game describes better with diagrams, so bear with me and be as imaginative as someone actually playing the game while I describe how it works.
The first player hides the atoms on the grid and marks down their locations with a crayon on a plastic slate. The seeker, the player solving the puzzle, selects an edge position and imagines firing a beam of light into the Black Box grid. If the beam “misses” and hits nothing, then it strikes the opposite side of the grid.
The seeker marks both start and end locations with identical tokens. The seeker now has a pretty good idea that the selected column or row is empty and that the ones on either side of it contain no atoms. If they had, the light beam would detour and come out at another grid position on the board’s edge, or possibly even reflect back to the starting location. Detours strike the atom tangentially — a fancy way to say they hit the “corner” of the atom — and bounce away at 90-degree angles toward the grid edge; matching tokens are placed at the detour’s start and end positions. Reflections are a special type of detour that sends the light back to the origin. Reflections are marked only at the origin.
Hits occur when the light beam strikes an atom dead on and is absorbed into it. Of course, the hit may not be in the row or column where the beam started. The beam could actually detour, perhaps more than once, on its way to the hit. Tricky. Like reflections, they are marked only at the origin.
The seeker studies the results of each light beam and places marbles to mark suspected atom locations. When all are marked, the board is revealed and scored. In a two-player game, roles reverse and the hider becomes the seeker.
Scoring is based on the number of light beams fired plus a penalty added for missed guesses. Scores will vary from game to game, ranging from eight to 18 points, depending on the puzzle’s difficulty. Lower scores beat higher scores.
The game has been released through several publishers over the years: Waddingtons, Parker Brothers, Franjos, and others, under the names Black Box, Logo, Ko-Code, Ordo, and Planétaire. Finding a physical copy of the game may be challenging, as it is currently out of print.
Happily, there are several versions of the game online that play like the origi- nal, except for the ability to set up challenges for other players. That alone can make getting a physical copy worth the trouble. I was surprised to find that the polished online implementation by Bear Bibeault, which mimics the appearance of the 1977 Parker Brothers edition, was my favorite.
I say surprised because the Parker Brothers version, despite the elegance of its construction, can be visually confusing. The game itself is a beautiful piece of industrial design — a self-contained black plastic box with curved corners, a shiny, crisply molded play grid, yellow atoms, and flat, futuristic-looking markers in red, yellow, and orange, with symbols on the orange ones to mark detours. Beautiful, but I found myself seeing only the orange color and not the symbols. Waddingtons and others resolved the same feature with colored pawns. It’s a less elegant solu- tion, but possibly easier to follow.
The rules for Black Box are simple, but internalizing how they work is not. What makes this game worthy of this collection is the type of spatial visualization necessary to “see” how the hidden atoms affect the world. Understanding and applying the feedback from the detours, hits, and reflections, even with props, to deduce the location of atoms requires serious mental exercise.
As I said, it takes a bit of imagining.
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